My name is Nicole Body and for many years I struggled with becoming sick almost every time I tried to eat food. I tried everything: going to doctors’ offices, scans/testing, and attempting every diet I could imagine but no one could figure out what was wrong with me. In June 2017, the nausea and intolerance to food was the worst it had ever been, so I found myself back in the doctor’s office searching for answers once again. My doctor thought it was my gallbladder, which I had heard before, and upon doing an ultrasound and CT scan, my gallbladder looked fine, but he saw a lesion resting on my pancreas.
After further testing, he found that my gallbladder was failing through a nuclear medicine test called the HIDA scan and we now knew that it was indeed my gallbladder that was causing these symptoms for years. The timing for this discovery could not have been better as they also found that the lesion on my pancreas was possibly cancer. On July 18, 2017, I was diagnosed with stage 3 Undifferentiated Pleomorphic Sarcoma at age 27. After four rounds of chemo and two surgeries, there has been no evidence of disease found since Dec. 13, 2017. Today, I am a cancer-free woman!
Living in Colorado is great, but two things it was lacking during my cancer journey:
1. It’s a little chilly in winter when you’re bald.
2. There are no Disney parks located here.
When my best friend’s family told me they wanted to pay for us to make a trip to Disneyland before my biggest surgery, I was ecstatic! I couldn’t wait to get out of the hospital and head to the Happiest Place on Earth! My friend makes ears and she made me a pair of green and red sparkly ears to wear on my beautifully bald head to celebrate the Christmas season since it was a December trip.
The only problem is that with my bald head, I couldn’t keep the ears on top of my head! Every time I made a sudden turn, or a gust of wind picked up, my ears would fall down my face only to be stopped by my nose creating a sparkly pair of “Disney goggles.” We couldn’t stop laughing and captured many great moments on camera when this happened!
We think that the mouse ear “headbands” should have a name change to “hairbands” because without hair, they do not want to stay on! We made the most of it and laughed as the Santa Ana winds picked up and almost blew them off my head multiple times.
This last week I went back to Disneyland with my closest friends and this time I had some hair to hold them on! But I will never forget that trip and how we laughed through it and my entire treatment.
Finding humor in cancer is essential and keeping a positive attitude goes a long way!
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